IT General Controls (ITGC) Review Services for Auditors in Riyadh

IT general controls, covering access management, change management and IT operations, underpin every other control that depends on a system working correctly, which means a weak ITGC environment can quietly undermine financial and operational controls that otherwise look fine on paper.

The problems we're usually called in to fix

What we typically hear

Access management, change management and IT operations controls haven't been reviewed together
Financial and operational controls that look fine on paper are quietly undermined by weak ITGC
No one has checked whether the foundation underneath other controls is actually solid
A weak ITGC environment is putting otherwise-good controls at risk without anyone noticing

How we approach it

Access management, change management and IT operations reviewed as the foundation they are
Other controls checked against whether their ITGC foundation actually holds
A weak foundation identified before it undermines controls that look fine on paper
ITGC treated as what it actually is: the base every other control depends on

IT General Controls (ITGC) Review

A finance system running for a company in KAFD is only as strong as the access and change management controls underneath it, the part an ITGC review actually tests.

This sits close to cyber and digital risk advisory but addresses a different, more specific question: not whether the company is protected from external attack, but whether the internal system controls governing access and change are actually reliable, which is often where a risk control matrix depends most heavily on ITGC being solid underneath it.

The three core areas ITGC actually covers

Access management, whether the people who can act within a system genuinely match current roles and responsibilities, change management, whether changes to the system are properly tested and approved before going live rather than pushed directly to production, and IT operations, covering backup discipline, job scheduling, and incident handling when something does go wrong.

Why this matters even if your cyber posture looks fine

A company can have strong external cybersecurity defenses and still carry weak ITGCs internally: an employee who left the company six months ago still has active system access, or a finance system change went live without proper testing and quietly broke a reconciliation process nobody noticed for two reporting periods. These are meaningfully different risks from an external attack but can be just as damaging to financial reporting integrity.

Connecting to ERP-specific controls

For companies running SAP or similar systems, this overlaps directly with dedicated SAP GRC work, since an ITGC review often surfaces exactly the same access and segregation issues that a proper GRC implementation is designed to prevent from recurring going forward.

What we deliver

Testing of access rights against your current organizational structure, a review of recent system changes for proper approval trails, and a prioritized remediation list distinguishing urgent access risks from lower-impact process gaps that can be scheduled more gradually.

Local context

Companies operating across multiple entities in Riyadh, each potentially on a different system or a different instance of the same ERP, need ITGC testing performed separately at each entity rather than assuming a review at head office covers the group, since access and change management practices frequently diverge meaningfully between entities even under common ownership.

IT General Controls (ITGC) Review, answered

How is this different from a cybersecurity assessment?

Cybersecurity focuses primarily on external threats and technical defenses. ITGC review focuses on the internal reliability of access and change management, which matters even in the complete absence of any external attack.

How often should ITGC reviews happen?

Annually at minimum, aligned with the broader internal audit or ICFR testing cycle, since ITGC findings frequently affect the reliability of other controls being tested in the same period.

What happens if we find access issues?

We prioritize findings by actual risk, an ex-employee with live financial system access is addressed immediately, while a role-mismatch with limited practical impact can be scheduled into a normal remediation cycle rather than treated as equally urgent.

IT General Controls (ITGC) Review Services for Auditors in Riyadh

At a glance

The problems we're usually called in to fix

What we typically hear

How we approach it